


Without You I Am Nothing

by AsbestosMouth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mild Smut, Reunions, Revenge Sex, S604, Strong Female Characters, Vengeance thy name is Sansa, jonsa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 22:11:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6925318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsbestosMouth/pseuds/AsbestosMouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castle Black is monochrome, but Sansa blazes like the fires of Rh'llor. Jon cannot help but burn.</p><p>Rated Mature for sex and violence, like the rest of Game of Thrones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without You I Am Nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jillypups](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/gifts).



* * *

 

 

Sansa is beautiful, and death is nothing compared to the burnished copper of her hair.

 

Death is emptiness. Death is black cold, deserts of obsidian and dragon-glass stretching upon an endless plain. He remembers the bone-deep chill, so sharp it pierced his soul like the weapons that slaughtered him like a pig in the snow. Blindness of a sort, where everything is reduced to a pinprick of eternity that stretches for aeons.

 

Nothing. Forever. Just the wastes and the bleakness and the trudge of the boots he died in, crunching across the viscous clinging sand.

 

The fire that brings him back lives in Sansa’s hair. In the curve of her creamy throat where her pulse trembles. That spark in her Tully blue eyes that regard him with a shocked, desperate intensity.

 

His breath hitches, and for a moment he feels suffocated, constricted. She stands before him, in her black Crow-like cloak, gown of Stark grey. Nothing remains of her arrogance, her haughty elegance so perfectly tamed by the loving hand of her Septa. The ignorant girl who left for the south is no more; this woman is created from the living flesh of someone who no longer exists. She glows. The courtyard is monochrome nothingness, and she blazes, alive and living and glorious.

 

They fly to each other’s arms, and Jon realises with a grim jolt of amusement that Sansa is taller than him now. Tall, and full grown, and lovely beyond all comprehension as they cling so very tightly. Travel-stained, too thin, shadowed about her exhausted eyes, yes. Scarred, even if he does not know why. Her hand finds his neck, soft kid gloves not suited for the conditions north of Winterfell, and Sansa nuzzles herself into his cheek.

 

Salt traces his tongue, thickening as he swallows.

 

How many years has it been since he last touched family? Felt warmth? Ygritte lingers, and her hair was Sansa’s hair. That jolts him, and his arms tighten. Endless winter erodes even the hardiest of men, turning them to crumbs of flesh moldering, or shards of ice embedded into hearts. The Wall changes them all, from men to something haunting. Ghosts of men, trapped in this permafrost of existence. It hardens, and breaks, and reforges into wights.

 

In his embrace Sansa is warm, and reassuringly scented of home and memory; summers, and archery lessons. Sword practice. Lemon cakes. Needle. Arya’s laugh, Bran’s quiet intensity. Robb’s honest grin. Rickon’s wolf-wildness. Ned. Even Cat.

 

Everything. She is everything. And she is here.

 

“Jon,” she murmurs, her voice shivering, and for that moment the eternity of death does not chase him, leaves him be. In her arms, and Sansa is so reassuringly there, and bright, and burning, that the horror lies dormant. She is Rh’llor’s flame. She is the Dawn. She is Light.

 

Death cannot compete with sweet remembrance of a kinder time, and Sansa’s warm breath upon his ear, and her trembling desperation as she gathers him so tightly to her lean body.

 

* * *

 

She tells him, eventually, of Ramsay Bolton and Theon Greyjoy. Her voice is low, and does not stumble, and he sees how she has changed. Grown. Become strong through her suffering.

 

Sansa does not cry. She is not the girl who left for King’s Landing, full of summer and Joffrey Baratheon and dreams of courtly love. Where is his brattish sister, who never gave him courtesy of calling him brother? Still she calls him Jon, though the reason seems heavier, more adult than the petulance of a girl not yet flowered. She speaks of rape, and torture, and the destruction of their home. Deaths of those he does not know, mindless and wanton. Her own innocence, dragged from her in King’s Landing, a dead thing trampled beneath the feet of those who would use Sansa for their own games.

 

And yet she does not break. She looks at his face, unmoved, and speaks of horrors that no woman should suffer. In a litany of disgrace that drags his spine and freezes his flesh even more than death she tells him exactly why the Boltons must fall, why the North must rise, why she will take the back the birthright that is hers, and her siblings - and his, she tells him, and those beautiful eyes are hard.

 

Jon believes her. He believes everything.

 

Sansa could take the North. She could take the Iron Throne.

 

She is vengeance, and justice. She is fire and passion, to his icy death and failure.

 

For the first time for so very long, Jon Snow knows something that is not just the emptiness of life lost.

 

The ends of the earth are not far enough; he will follow Sansa to the nothingness, where blood still pours from wounds not yet knit, death weighing heavy upon his shoulders, and the obsidian stretches across a moonscape of desolation.

 

* * *

 

Death changes Jon just as life changes Sansa.

 

Sometimes memories slip, unbidden, grains of sand through his fingers. He wakes, breathless and head pounding, desperately chasing a dream that is silk-sheened and unreal. Ghosts of the past trickle through his mind like water, and like glacial streams, they cannot be dammed and kept still. No millpond thoughts, but ever ebbing with the trauma of his renewed living.

 

She reminds him, gently, when Jon cannot think. Sansa sees his blankness and the terror, and she takes his hand in hers. Her strength builds his own; with her, living is less terrible for that moment, at least.

 

Her sobbing comes at night, when there is nothing but the faint suggestion of stars, and the wilderness silence of the North. During the weak light, as they travel ever onwards with their wilding army, with Tormund half in love with the Lady Brienne and his friends from Castle Black at their heels, she throws herself into plotting. The game of thrones is chess before her, long white fingers moving knights and pawns in an endless dance where the players make their own rules, and often set fire to the board.

 

Sleep is too much like death.

 

Jon patrols, Ghost his red-eyed shadow.

 

Fires burn to ember-glowing red piles of ash. The heavens whirl, stars trailing white and blue in an ink-black sky that reminds him too much of the endlessness.

 

The tent is nothing special. There is no brocade, or soft cushioning. Just a plain cot bed, and layer upon layer of fur.

 

Sansa. Tangled braids, and white skin, and freckles not befitting a high-born lady of her station and rank. More than anything she is beautiful. The finery of King’s Landing could not add to her copper-haired beauty, that inner core of cold hardened iron that drives them onward.

 

She rubs a hand across her face, naked with the emotion that forces through in sleep. He comes to her, kneels upon the furs, takes her hand in his. Sometimes even steel must bend.

 

His strength builds her own; life is less terrible for a moment, at least

 

* * *

 

Winterfell is broken, a shattered hulk of what used to be the proud North.

 

The blood of battle still flecks his dark armour, vambraces gore-slicked and leathers stained. Lord Commander Tollett cajoled Jon, made him take Longclaw, made him swear to live to return and fight the Walkers, the Winter, the Long Night. The weapon hangs at his hip, tapping lightly at his metal-clad thigh as Sansa leads him up endless crumbling stone steps.

 

Upwards, ever upwards.

 

Towers crack like broken teeth, the glass houses long shattered. No more blue roses, no more sweetly-scented herb garden. The weirwood seems still, dead. The red leaves lay upon the snow, like bloody puddles. For a thousand years and more there has been a fortress at Winterfell, from wooden motte to heavy-hewn citadel, commanding and bleakly lowering.

 

The room is silent.

 

Black velvet, embroidered with a pink thread; the colour of muscle, flayed skin. Handsome furniture in the Northern tradition of sturdy and unadorned, and he recognises the heavy oaken four poster bed. Before this, when he was small and playing hide and seek with Robb and Theon, Jon hid beneath silver and grey coverlets that carried the light scent of Catelyn’s perfume.

 

Her eyes sharpen, and she touches the bed linen. Fists the fine fabrics, nails ripping and clawing.

 

She tears it from the bed with a feral wolvish snarl and throws it to the floor.

 

“It will burn,” Jon promises. “Everything of his shall burn, Sansa.”

 

“I cannot burn this room, Jon. I cannot burn Winterfell.”

 

He understands, hollow for her. Her parents’ marriage bed became her own. Her nightmare, in Bolton colours, even if the bastard lies dead upon the snow and the ravens devour his corpse. 

 

“What can be done?”

 

Her hair, copper and blood, pours across her throat.

 

“Come here.” His limbs feel heavy, dragging, the air thick and stifling. “Come here, Jon.”

 

Sansa’s hand finds the nape of his neck as she clings, Jon’s arms about her back and waist, and she nuzzles the curve of his cheekbone, his jaw. Castle Black. Memories of cloaks, and the tightness of breath. Her hair. Her beautiful hair. Stubble scrapes, and she smells of fire and snow, of blood. She watched, expressionless, as Longclaw removed Bolton’s head from his shoulders, then turned and rode for Winterfell without a backward glance.

 

The North knows that the one who speaks the sentence swings the sword; Sansa called for death, and Jon, her weapon, cleaved and dug and shattered in her grip.

 

“Make it better, Jon.” Lips at his ear, whispering breath sweet. “Obliterate his memory, force it from this place. You executed him for me. I just ask one more thing - kill him once more in this bed, so he is truly gone.”

 

The thickness slows time to a crawl. Her mouth, her heat, the way Sansa fits against his armoured chest. Alive and blazing, the glory of the North, in Jon’s never quite warm embrace. How can he refuse? How can Jon pull back, say no, when Sansa’s presence, her vitality, keeps him from dwelling upon death? Every moment they are together is one less memory of the bleak infinity.

 

“Anything. Anything for you.” He finds her mouth, ripe and parting for his tongue, and she pulls her skirts about her hips, unlaces his armour, and they sink to the mattress.

 

For the first time since he died, alone and betrayed and bleeding out into the snow, Jon feels a the warmth of living rather than the cold of death flowing through his veins. He gives her everything, pours his soul and worship with a roil of his hips, his mouth burning kisses across her damp-skinned throat. Sansa writhes beneath and around him, so hot, so very hot, matching his movements as her lips part in a savage pleasure that has him sobbing her name over and over.

 

As her chipped fingernails tear his shirt and paint white-raised welts along his half-healed back, and as she shudders with a vicious hunger at driving the demons from Winterfell, Jon, and herself, Sansa tells him that he is hers, forever, in darkness and in light.

 

Death is nothing.

 

Life is auburn, and fire, and silken flesh against his scarred chest. Her voice babbling his name. Strength. Justice. Vengeance.

  
_ Sansa _ .

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to write Jonsa, and then Jillypups happened. Have a fic, woman, because this is your fault.


End file.
